Google Shows Off Hardware Design Using IBM Chips

Google has developed a motherboard for server systems using IBM 's new Power8 chip.

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It’s no secret that IBM wants to move its technology into the kind of data centers that Google and other Web giants operate. Now comes evidence that Google is putting some serious work into that possibility.

The Internet search company on Monday said it has designed a motherboard for server systems that uses IBM’s new Power8 chip, which has typically only been found in hardware designed by IBM itself. Google and other cloud-style companies now almost universally rely on x86 chips, the kind long associated with Intel.

Google said it developed the board to help adapt its software to run on Power8-based machines.

“In order to do that we had to build a piece of hardware,” said Gordon MacKean, a senior director in Google’s hardware group at an IBM event in Las Vegas.

MacKean also chairs the OpenPower Foundation, a multi-company group that IBM helped form in an effort to build a broader audience for its chip technology. The latest disclosures follow on the heels of others made by the group and IBM at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

He did not say whether or how Google might actually deploy Power8 technology to handle Web searches or other computing chores. But the hardware and software efforts certainly suggest that the technology trend-setter is at least seriously considering shifting some of its work away from Intel’s technology.

Mark Miller, an Intel spokesman, said last week that it questions IBM’s claims that Power8 has performance advantages over Intel chips. “That said, we don’t take competition lightly and are not standing still,” he said.